Category: News

A look at year-end numbers for Stanford real estate sales shows a more than 50 percent decrease in single-family residence sales from academic years 2005-2006 to 2008-2009 — down to 23 from 48 — while sale prices stayed within the same ranges as previous years.

Faculty Staff Housing (FSH), a division of the Office of the Provost, assists eligible faculty and executive-level staff in acquiring permanent housing in the area, including on University-owned land. Most faculty and staff in on-campus housing are found in neighborhoods surrounding the central campus, such as Santa Ynez Street, Mayfield Avenue or condominiums on Peter Coutts Circle or Pearce Mitchell Place.

In the 2005-2006 academic year, FSH reported 48 sales of single-family residences on campus, including 11 condominiums. By academic year 2008-2009, the total on-campus sales number dropped to 23. As of Jan. 6, 2010, only 10 sales have been made in the current academic year.

Single-family homes during the 2008-2009 academic year sold for between $1.3 and $2.5 million, whereas condominiums ranged from $350,000 to $840,000.

In the wake of the housing bubble bust, housing markets in surrounding cities have become noticeably less active, with sales numbers dropping along with home prices, said locals involved in real estate.

Jan Thomson, Stanford’s FSH manager, explained that the on-campus housing market lags behind the surrounding housing markets, but generally follows outside trends in terms of mortgage rates and other measurements.

Thomson emphasized, however, that the small campus housing market is likely affected by the limited number of residences available.

“The [sale] numbers reflect the supply on campus,” she said. “It’s largely dependent on what’s available, as compared to off-campus housing, which has much more available.”

Thomson noted that declining sales numbers can be partly attributed to the University’s less aggressive recruitment of new faculty because of recent financial restraints. Some rental housing has also been unoccupied, but Thomson hopes to see them occupied in the near future.

Real estate agents who handle sales on campus agreed that availability plays a large role in determining yearly sales numbers.

“Clients will look both on and off campus when trying to buy a home in the area,” said real estate agent Monica Corman of Alain Pinel Realtors. “They often end up off campus, simply because there’s nothing available on campus.”

She noted that faculty and staff who want to reside on campus find “very little inventory” available to them.

The general market also plays a role; Corman noted that “volume and prices are down everywhere.”

Coldwell Banker agent Carole Feldstein, who has sold on campus for more than 20 years, said she “has not noticed any trends” specific to the Stanford housing market.

“Stanford properties follow market tendencies,” she said.

She said that differences between comparable residences on and off campus depend on available inventory.

“It would be misleading to generalize about on-campus housing trends,” Feldstein said.

Looking forward, 39 new faculty- and staff-only residences are in development in the Olmstead Terrace neighborhood near Stanford Avenue, and Olmstead Road sales are expected to begin this spring.

“The newest housing developments will be very interesting,” Corman said. “The developments are nicer and newer, but higher density. I think it will bring a new energy to campus.”

After last summer’s anti-government protests following the disputed presidential election in Iran, authorities set up show trials of over 100 alleged opposition leaders. One of Stanford’s own came into focus: Dr. Abbas Milani, co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution and director of Iranian Studies at Stanford.

The statement read that Milani was even more important to the CIA than Shah Reza Pahlavi’s son because of Milani’s close contact with reformists and his position at “an institute called Hooffer”–the most important of the American foundations behind the Velvet Revolution, according to the court’s statement.

In the U.S., Milani is one of the most respected scholars on Iranian politics. He is the resident Iran expert for The New Republic magazine and has been interviewed on CNN. In July 2009, he testified before the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the House of Representatives.

His path to success, however, was all but straight. Milani was born into a prominent Iranian family–one uncle a senator, another a minister in the cabinet. At age 15, he was sent to study in the United States and enrolled in Oakland Technical High School, from which he managed to graduate only a year later.

Milani went on to Oakland’s Merritt College where, as he writes in his 1996 biography “Tales of Two Cities,” the two founders of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, “gave [him his] first taste of radicalism,” just at the emergence of the Black Power Movement.

Having transferred to Berkeley in 1968, Milani joined a Marxist student group opposing the Pahlavi regime in power in Iran. He remained stateside until receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii in 1974, at which point he was ready to return to his homeland.

“I really wanted to go back quickly to Iran,” he recalled. “I was a radical student. I wanted to go back and make the revolution.”

In Tehran, he began teaching political science at National University. The revolution that Milani had envisioned, however, never came. Coating his Marxist ideas in metaphors while lecturing, Milani failed to carry on unnoticed. After just two years back in Tehran, he was dealt a five-year prison sentence for opposing the regime, despite his family’s ties in government.

“In Iran at the time,” he said, “and in Iran today, I think, the one crime that connection cannot solve is political.”

However, after plea bargaining and agreeing not to attack the regime in a media-packed courtroom, his sentence was shortened to one year. During this time, Milani spent six months in the notorious Evin Prison.

“Because I was a university professor and came from a prominent family, I was placed in Cell Block Number One, [a division of the prison reserved for special inmates],” he said.

But despite this, he was granted no special treatment.

“The head of domestic intelligence told me during one of my interrogations, ‘Don’t think your family can save you. Your ass is mine,’” he recalled.

At the time, Cell Block Number One held some of the most influential leaders of the revolution yet to come; among them, Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, Ayatollah Rafsanjani and Ayatollah Mahdavi Kani. Milani’s close contact with them turned him into a skeptic of the flowery speeches of democracy that Ayatollah Khomeini delivered from exile in Paris and of the Islamic Revolution itself once it hit the streets of Tehran in 1979.

“I spent time with these guys in prison. I knew how intolerant they would be,” he said. “I sensed that what was coming was a form of despotism worse than what was leaving us. Mixing religion and democracy would not be an option.”

Upon his release, the shah’s regime kept barring Milani from the classroom because he was considered a leftist. He believes that the shah’s fear of communism blinded him from the foe that would eventually overthrow him.

“They thought we–a group of small students–were their main enemy and they allowed the clergy to do anything they wanted,” he said.

The political science professor also draws a parallel to the Cold War.

“The US made the same mistake in Afghanistan,” he said. “They thought they could use the Islamists against the Soviet Union and they were successful in doing it. But they created a monster bigger than, or at least as big as, the monster they were fighting.”

Milani laughs as he recalls the chaos surrounding the hottest days of the Islamic Revolution in ’79. He joined a group of professors with the endeavor of keeping Teheran University a non-militarized zone.

“People had ransacked army depots–everybody carried a machine gun. Somebody even brought a tank into the University,” he said, pausing with a smile as he remembered the events that followed. “So we asked them to take it out. And they did.”

According to his students, his apparent ease and lightheartedness are translated into his teaching.

“[He is] one of the most laid back and personable professors I’ve ever had at Stanford,” said Andi Harrington ’12, one of his students in this quarter’s Polisci 245R: Politics in Modern Iran. “His class offers relief even though the content is so dense through his simple and concise descriptions and of course with a little humor.”

One of his advisees, Miguel Molina ’11, said that keeping in mind his close interaction with Iranian politics, including imprisonment, makes his impartial work in the classroom all the more impressive.

“His unbiased scholarship and teaching is remarkable and commendable,” he said. “After each class session, you walk away with the sensation of not just having learned a great deal, but with the intellectual comfort of having the ability of fomenting your own educated opinions.”

After the Islamic Revolution, Milani went back to teaching, but encountered the same types of barriers to his scholarship that he had under the shah–popularity among students intertwined with suspensions and dismissals.

In 1986, while Milani sought a second opinion before undergoing open-heart surgery, an American doctor, Dr. Childs at UCLA, said there was nothing wrong with his heart and instead diagnosed the scholar with “Khomeini Syndrome.” Milani understood the time to leave Iran had come once again.

“I left a job at the top university in the country and came here with no job,” he recalled. “I literally had to work as a bartender initially to make ends meet.”

The university professor joined the ranks of Spangler’s Bar in Berkeley. Luckily, Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, Calif. soon appointed Dr. Milani as Chair of the Department of History and Political Science, where he stayed for 12 years.

But his longtime comfort at Notre Dame de Namur would soon be briskly disrupted. Milani was again put in the spotlight of Iranian expatriate political life when a group of Persian Americans raised enough money through donations to create the Iran Democracy Project at Hoover.

Milani speaks lovingly and proudly of the project. Although the Bush administration allocated $75 million in efforts to promote democracy in Iran and, according to Milani, offered him one of those millions, he kindly declined.

“We decided that we were going to be a grassroots, non-government endeavor and we have remained that,” he explained.

Only hours prior to speaking to The Daily, Milani went on the Voice of America and addressed this issue of government funding.

“If you can find evidence that we got one penny from the U.S. government–one penny–I will never utter a word about Iran again,” he stated. He reinforced this to The Daily: “It is absolute, utter nonsense.”

Khomeini’s government has been the project’s most outspoken opponent, linking it to American imperialism and the CIA. It even named Milani an enemy of the state and now Stanford University is–along with Yale–on the regime’s list of “subversive organizations.”

The regime that denounced him, Milani explained, is fractured and scared. Even Ahmadinejad’s supporters are leaving what seems to be a sinking ship.

“They know they are sitting on a seething volcano. They know people hate them,” he said. “Any sudden move can unleash this wrath. If they thought they could’ve gotten away with killing Mousavi [the “runner-up” in June’s presidential election], they would have killed him yesterday. Not only haven’t they killed him, they’ve increased his bodyguards.”

Even if it wanted to, the Hoover Institution inspiring a democratic revolution in Iran would be a major long shot, if not impossible. But what about a revolution from the Iranian people themselves?

“Unless people want a potentially bloody civil war, you can’t be looking for a revolution in that sense,” he said. “I think Iran will need a transitional phase before democracy. For that to happen, you need the will of the people and I think we have that.”

Ever wonder what the deal was with that one-unit class on Disney films being taught by the guy down the hall last spring? Were those fliers a joke or could students actually get academic credit for learning something fun, yet interesting, from a peer? This is just one example of a Student Initiated Course (SIC), a laid-back, discussion-based class option worthy of consideration.

SICs take advantage of one of Stanford’s most valuable resources–the student body itself. Students have the opportunity to design a curriculum and instruct their peers on a specific topic of interest.

These one- to two-unit weekly classes taught for credit/no credit cover an eclectic range of unusual–and often under-represented–subjects. This quarter, students had the opportunity to enroll in SICs ranging from “Development and Diversity in Papua New Guinea” to “Discoveries and Debates in Neuroscience Research” to an “Intro to North American Taiko.”

Jenna Gunderson ’11, an avid sports fan, co-taught a course called “Introduction to American Sports in American Society” last quarter.

“We thought that some Stanford students might be interested in learning more about sports,” she said. “We thought maybe it would get them pumped for going to different sporting events.”

Dan Bohm ’10 taught the class with her. Unsurprisingly, he’s also a big sports fan–he writes for The Daily’s sports section and has played and coached different sports throughout his life. In coming up with the idea for the class, both Bohm and Gunderson felt that providing students with greater exposure to sports and their rules, histories and roles in our society might make students more excited about attending Stanford games.

“We wanted to spread the wealth about sports to a group on campus that we thought wasn’t necessarily as interested as we were,” he said.

Janani Balasubramanian ‘12 and Matthew Miller ‘12, who are teaching a class called “The Color of Ecoliteracy” this quarter, also wanted to expose fellow students to their combined intellectual passions of racial studies and the environment. They felt that these particular passions were lacking adequate coverage in the available professor-led courses here.

“We have a lot of really great environmental studies classes and a lot of great classes on race,” Balasubramanian said. “But there aren’t that many classes that deal with both.”

Miller agreed that SICs like theirs have the potential to provide a more interdisciplinary angle to topics than the typical department offerings might.

“We feel that a lot of times classes make you fraction off your academic passions and not really deal with the whole equation,” he said.

One of Miller and Balasubramanian’s students, Rachel Dowling ’10, signed up for the class because of its efforts to synthesize two previously isolated issues.

“I decided to take this class because there aren’t any other classes that deal with this specific issue,” she said. “It addresses a unique feature of environmentalism.”

To lead a SIC, teachers-to-be are required to attend training sessions, secure a faculty advisor, fill out an application and prepare for a quarter’s worth of instruction by assembling materials, PowerPoints and discussion ideas.

According to students who have taken SICs before, their shortcomings are minimal and understandable due to the logistics of these classes; they simply don’t meet that often in any given quarter.

“For a one-unit class that meets only one hour a week, I thought that most of the drawbacks–lack of coverage of certain topics, for instance–were manageable and understandable,” said Chris Seck ‘10 who took Gunderson and Bohm’s class on sports in the fall.

Helen Kwan ’11, who took a SIC on Harry Potter her freshman year, had little to say in complaint about her SIC either.

“Maybe the biggest drawback would be a lack of potential resources that professors have access to,” she stated.

In addition to providing students with exposure to under-explored areas of interest, SICs also foster a different, more comfortable format of idea exchange within the classroom setting.

“In most regular classes, the information tends to flow one way–the professor enlightens the student with lectures and stories,” Seck noted. “In student-led classes, the experience tends to be more interactive because the age gap–and experience gap–is not so great.”

Official leaked pics of the Mini Countryman have appeared, only one day after a teaser video of the Mini crossover vehicle. The version of the Mini Countryman seen in these pics is an all-wheel-drive Cooper S, with a new grille and front bumper. It’s similar to the Mini Beachcomber concept seen at the 2010 Detroit auto show, although appears to be slightly more compact, and with a hatch shape closer to the Mini Cooper.

This particular colour is Pepper White, contrasted with a black roof and blacked out wheels. The mini Countryman keeps the dual exhaust pipes, and has an interior design in classic Mini style, incorporating a speedometer in a centrally mounted position in the dash. It has black seats and white overhead, although the turquoise coloured door and centre trim is a bit bizarre.

The Mini Countryman won’t officially debut until the 2010 Geneva Motor Show in March, and will be available on the market by the end of the year. It will cost about 25,000 euros, while you can expect to pay about 4,000 euros more for the Cooper S version. Expect to see more details soon, after these leaked pics, and check out the psychedelic teaser video after the jump.

Mini Countryman leaked pics

Source | World Car Fans

For the first time in 40 years, a Ford vehicle has been named official pace car for one of the most famed races in the US, the Daytona 500. The Ford in question is a 2011 Mustang GT, a vehicle which, prior to the race, will be auctioned at the 39th Annual Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale Collector Car Auction on Jan. 23, for the benefit of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF).

The Mustang is a preview of the production car which will become available in dealerships later this spring. It… (read more)

A friend of mine from my previous company named Enrique has joined forces with the folks at TechZulu as a part of of their TechPunch crew. One of the first things they decided to do was to head to the recent CES electronic conference in Las Vegas. When they got there, according to Enrique, CES was all hype, but wasn’t at all what he expected.

While CES is going on, you see countless internet shows like Tekzilla, G4’s AOTS, and others swarm to CES to show us the latest and greatest in new toys and gadgets. On those shows it looks wild, but according to my friend it is more like a glorified Best Buy. Because of their disappointment they decided to satire their experience.

From Enrique on TechZulu:

Simply put, this was the first time Jacob and I had ever been to CES, and honestly – I was expecting a little more than a glorified Best Buy and Radio Shack, sans cash registers. By the middle of the first day, after my awe of “holy moly – that’s a big booth!” wore off, there really wasn’t much else to see… aside from blurry televisions.

Yes, I understand, 3D is the wave of the future… circa 1950. I get that, and think it’s really neat.

Here are their videos from CES:

If you liked what you saw above, you can keep up with all of their antics over at http://techzulu.com/techpunch. You can also follow them on Twitter @techpunch.

I decided to move away from IntenseDebate for my comments, and move over to Disqus. It wasn’t because I was unhappy with IntenseDebate, I just like the features of Disqus better. Some of the cool things you may notice with it is the ability to login to Disqus with your Facebook, Twitter or Yahoo accounts!

Another thing I like about it is it seems more customizable to me. For instance, for guest commenter’s, I was able to change the generic avatar picture. So now if you leave a guest comment, you have the pleasant image of Bauer-Power Tux!

Another thing I like about Disqus is that it seems more and more big names are using it. Ping.fm uses it for Media comments, SignOnSanDiego.com uses it as well for article comments!

Moving over to Disqus is really easy too. They can import all of your Blogger, IntenseDebate, JS-Kit, Movable Type, and WordPress comments!

Need more reasons to move to Disqus? Here is a list of reasons from the Disqus site:

Connect Your Conversations

Sometimes the conversation happens away from your site. That’s OK. Now you can link up with the social web using Reactions, our feature that hooks into results from uberVU and BackType. Seek out social comments and mentions from places such as Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, and YouTube, then display them with your comments.

Say Hello to Millions of Commenters

That’s right — millions of active commenters are already by recognized by the system. Disqus Comments also lets your readers choose their identity, with Facebook Connect, OpenID, or Twitter Sign-in, when they leave a comment.

Experience Real-time Discussions

Bring lively, real-time chatter onto your page with real-time posting and updating. With rich interactive features such as threaded replies and comment replies, your discussions never feel dull.

Spread the Chatter

Allow your commenters to easily spread the discussion all across the social web, driving new traffic back to your site in the process. Every time someone leaves a comment, they can easily share the discussion happening on your site to friends and followers. Accelerate the distribution of your content by observing how effectively word travels across the Facebook Newsfeed and Twitter stream!

The Very Best Tools

Generic content management systems just aren’t built for handling discussions effectively. Our sleek and powerful moderation panel was designed for comments. Features such as multi-site moderation, multiple moderators, bulk actions, and automated decisions make Disqus Comments the most efficient tool for managing a large (or getting-there-large) community.

Comments Don’t Have to Be Painful

We’ve all been bitten before. As valuable as comments can be, dealing with them can be a chore. Disqus Comments lets you enjoy the benefits without the need to babysit your site. We use our own proprietary anti-spam that was built and trained to handle the junk some people try to pass off as comments. Disqus VIP also features cutting-edge semantic technology that helps you automatically recognize offensive posts and keep the discussion civilized.

Know Your Audience, Love Your Audience

Built-in compatibility with Disqus Profile means that you can encourage verified commenter profiles — real comments from real people. And with global reputation across all sites, you can track influential commenters on and off your site.

Do you have a blog? Are you using the generic comment system? Have you tried IntenseDebate or Disqus? What do you like best? Hit us up in the comments.

New Scientist has a piece on culture and psychological distress by Ethan Watters, the same chap who wrote the recent and widely discussed New York Times article on the ‘globalisation of mental illness’. This new article looks at similar territory but also pulls out some examples of where concepts and symptoms don’t translate well between different societies.

The meaning matters as much as the event,” says Ken Miller, a psychologist at Pomona College, Claremont, California, who studied in Afghanistan and elsewhere the reactions to war trauma.

He found many psychological reactions that were not on any western PTSD symptom list, and a few with no ready translation into English. In Afghanistan, for example, there was asabi, a type of nervous anger, and fishar-e-bala, the sensation of agitation or pressure.

Giathra Fernando, a psychologist at California State University, Los Angeles, also found culturally distinct psychological reactions to trauma in post-tsunami Sri Lanka. By and large, Sri Lankans didn’t report pathological reactions in line with the internal states making up most of the west’s PTSD checklist (hyperarousal, emotional numbing and the like). Rather, they tended to see the negative consequences of tragic events in terms of damage to social relationships. Fernando’s research showed the people who continued to suffer were those who had become isolated from their social network or who were not fulfilling their role in kinship groups. Thus Sri Lankans conceived the tsunami damage as occurring not inside their minds but outside, in the social environment.

It’s probably worth mentioning that this goes both ways and there are many everyday psychological concepts in English and Western society that don’t translate well into other languages.

Some of these become obvious when you read studies that have attempted to translate questionnaires originally in English into other languages.

For example, here’s an excerpt from a study that translated a mental health questionnaire from the World Health Organisation into Urdu:

This item [“Do you have trouble thinking clearly?”] presented considerable problems in translation. It measures the disturbance in concentration and cognition associated with depressive disorders. We could not find an exact substitute for the term, “clear thinking” in colloquial Urdu, and the nearest semantic and technically equivalent term that was acceptable in back translation was “wazay soch bichar”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t say what ‘wazay soch bichar’ is in English, so if you’re an Urdu speaker do get in touch as I’d love to find out.

It’s also often the case that words such as ‘anxiety’ may have a related word in another language but the sensations associated with it are not the same.

The New Scientist piece, taken from a forthcoming book by Watters, argues that Western concepts are now being exported around the world and local people are increasingly describing mental and social distress in terms of Western, and particularly, American, diagnoses.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Mind Hacks reader Matt for getting in touch with the translation:

i have a translation of ‘wazay soch bichar’ for you. my colleague nasir says the literal translation of it is ‘obvious thinking’ and agrees there is no direct translation of ‘thinking clearly’ in urdu and that ‘wasay….’ is the best available.

Link to ‘How the US exports its mental illnesses’.

Filed under: Morning Scoop

Each morning, we dish out a few links we love.

Are you sick enough to skip a day at work? Here are some signs that you should definitely take some time to recover on the couch (darn, eh?)

I think we can all relate — Jessica Simpson recently admitted that posing alongside super-thin models made her so nervous about being judged, she almost threw up.

Got a case of the winter blues? Hit the gym — studies show that exercise helps, along with friends and light exposure.

When it comes to eating fruit, here’s why you should avoid freeze-dried and go for the fresh stuff.

Speaking of fruit, research shows that British people eat more take-out and TV dinners than fruit and veg. Are we much better in North America? What do you think?

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Yesterday, I opined that not enough social media actions aside from donations actually benefit disaster relief or other humanitarian efforts.

However, it seems that at least one organization is helping Web users make their time and clicks count for a good cause, and I’ve never been happier to eat my words. The Haiti Earthquake Support Center, a project from The Extraordinaires (more on that later), allows users to make possible matches between submitted photos of missing persons and photos of Haitians post-earthquake.

Sponsor

It’s something facial recognition software should be able to do, but in the absence of suitable technology, perhaps the power of human effort and social media will have some positive effects for those searching for loved ones.

The premise of The Extraordinaires is revolutionary but simple. Organizations can create missions. Users can complete micro-tasks from their mobile devices or computers toward those missions. Currently, the site has around 50 participating organizations and about 6,000 members who have completed in excess of 35,000 micro-tasks. Missions range from mapping safe places for children to play to helping first-aid responders reduce fatalities.

For this particular mission, photos of missing people are submitted to the site. Then, users are asked to tag images captured during disaster relief efforts. These images are sometimes graphic, depicting the living and dead, the wounded and children. So far, more than 30,000 tags have been recorded. Next, users are asked to spend time deciding whether a particular tagged image matches a photo of a missing person.

To date, the site has led to only three possible matches between missing persons in Haiti and people in images captured after the Haitian earthquake. Clearly, more users are needed to make this site’s mission a success.

Finally, if a family member or friend has Internet access, he or she can search for a missing person on the site using keywords that are likely to be used as image tags, such as “male” or “teenager.” So far, 640 such searches have been made.

We hope that you will take a few minutes (or longer) to use this site yourself and help tag or match images. Also, if you know of similar efforts for social media users to help with disaster relief in Haiti, please let us know in the comments.

Discuss

Well it looks like Bill Gates will now be subjected to Lady Gaga trends, the fail whale, and follow friday because 12 hours ago he finally joined Twitter! His first tweet was “”Hello World.” Hard at work on my foundation letter – publishing on 1/25.” This may just be a jovial way of Bill saying ‘hi’ to his new twitter palls but Hello World is actually an output of a simple program that is taught to beginner programmers. Whether that was intended or not remains to be seen, but knowing Bill – it’s certainly a possibility.  So far it seems Bill has taken a break and his last tweet for the night was “@aplusk thanks to you and all the other people who have welcomed me. I’ve got a lot to learn about Twitter but look forward to sharing more.” and as usual, Ryan Seacrest seems to be blessed, since he got a reply from Mr. Gates as well.  As of 2:49am EST, we followed Bill Gates and his number of followers were bumped from 142459 to 142460. We must point out that one of the strangest people he is following in the midst of the White House, New York Times, and Microsoft is Ashley Tisdale….um, Bill, whyyyy?? I’ll just cough it up to one of your daughters getting a hold of your account…

Robert Kubica’s intrusion in the world of rallying lasted only 4 kilometers, as the Polish driver’s Renault Clio R3 suffered an engine failure during the prologue of this week’s Rally Monte Carlo. The round in the Principality counts for the season opener in the International Rally Challenge and was supposed to be Kubica’s first real rally event.

France’s publication Auto Hebdo reported that Kubica’s miss-happening took place in the icy prologue on Tuesday night, and that the Renault mechanic… (read more)

Filed under: Sex, Advice, Health

Have you been looking for your G spot for years with no luck? Are you wondering why it’s proving to be as elusive as the Loch Ness monster? Well, according to a recent study, reported in The Sunday Times by Lois Rogers, that’s because the G spot doesn’t exist. Scientists at King’s College London say there’s no scientific evidence to support the claim that the mythical cluster of nerve endings can be found in any woman.

So why do so many women claim they have a G spot? And where can you find it?

Continue reading Is the G-Spot a Myth?

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Whereas back in December 2008 the Pasadena Art Center College of Design hosted a design show with car company recruiters almost missing from the event, things seem to have changed during the past year. On January 20, the 2010 North American International Auto Show (NAIAS), backed by State Farm Insurance, will host the sixth edition of the Automotive Education Day.

Unlike in 2008, everyone of the automotive companies attending hopes students will play a crucial role in the industry’s future a… (read more)

Although General Motors has already started winding down Saab, both Spyker and Genii Capital, a.k.a. the two interested bidders that are still in the race for buying the Swedish unit, are confident that a deal could be reached soon. After Spyker’s CEO expressed his confidence that a final decision is to be made in the near future, Genii Capital is sure that Saab will be after all sold.

On the other hand, the Luxembourg-based financing firm is quite reticent when it comes to its chances to sec… (read more)